Peek: Photographs From The Kinsey Institute

PEEK: PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE KINSEY INSTITUTE

EXCERPTS

SELECTED BOOKS

Santa Fe, New Mexico: Arena Editions, and the Kinsey Institute, 2000 Preface by Betsy Stirratt and Jeffrey A. Wollin; Introduction by Carol Squiers; Essay by Jennifer Pearson Yamashiro

Fantasy, of course, is at the heart of sexual imagery, although the content and boundaries of the fantasy are often unavailable to the uninitiated. In one image, which is dated “before 1959,” a nude male figure lunges head first down a flight of stairs while propping his genitals up with one hand. The sheer weirdness of the pose inspires an obvious question: What in the heck is he doing? Once again, genital display seems to be the issue, although the pose looks so clumsily uncomfortable that the eroticism is difficult to locate. But there is obviously erotic potential for the people involved, which is one reason Kinsey may have been interested in the photo. He was looking for the largest sample of sexual behavior he could get, and in so doing had discovered the tremendous variety of human sexual experience. “Above all,” Paul Robinson writes of Kinsey’s ideas, “there was the extraordinary extent of individual variation, including many different techniques of intercourse and an even wider variety of psychological attitudes associated with sexual acts.”

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Peek continued

Carol Squiers

Despite considerable speculation, Kinsey and his colleagues had substantial, scholarly reasons for amassing an archive of erotica. The main purpose of this resource was to complement the data on sexual behavior that was obtained through interviews. Kinsey and his research team viewed a variety of materials, including visual imagery, as useful, even scientific data. Kinsey referred to art as data in his response to an antiquarian’s lead on available Asian art: “We might be interested in acquiring additional Oriental material. It would depend, however, upon the nature of the material and how much it added to the stock of data that are already available

from the considerable collection that we now own. Viewing imagery as data was central to his philosophy and collecting art became vital to his research.

Jennifer Pearson Yamashiro